The Fate of the Helmet and Other Stories
by Troid
Summary: After Samus unreasonably risked her life to go back and get it, what became of Adam's helmet? A collection of mostly unrelated, humorous oneshots from all corners of the Metroid universe. Plenty of Crocomire and a healthy dose of Other M mockery.
1. The Fate of the Helmet

Before you begin, I'd like to mention that this is all in good fun (I _liked_ Other M! honest! not at all the plot, but...) and I mean no offense to anyone or anything anywhere. In addition, I would like to state that

Claimer: THE ENTIRE METROID UNIVERSE BELONGS TO ME. SO THERE.

Enjoy, and please be so kind as to share your thoughts in a **review!**

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Galactic Federation Army helmets are built tough.

When Samus's ship crashed following the hostile X Parasite takeover, the headgear was borne on a wave of forceful air and slung to the stars, where it drifted peacefully and without incident like the majority of all cosmic objects. Space is, of course, largely empty, and the odds of the helm ever finding anything but the twinklings of distant stars reflected in its visor were slim, but one day it did indeed cross paths with another spacefairing body. The body in question was an unremarkable space freighter, the incompetent pilot of which had just—after an inordinate amount of time being carried further and further into nowhere by the thrusters—managed to get his warp drives online. So it was that the helmet was caught in the ship's warp field and transported somewhere new.

_Somewhere_ turned out to be an inhabited planet called Norion; specifically, an inhabited planet called Norion's atmosphere. The headwear began a violent journey earthward, flames flaring up around it as it became the galaxy's first shooting helmet. Its apparent target was a large Galactic Federation military complex, toward which the freighter was heading to either pick up or unload supplies (in all likelihood, the pilot himself didn't know). As it was, the helmet landed momentarily on the roof of one of the sprawling complex's many buildings, bounced and spun wildly, tumbled from the roof's ledge, and finally dropped an additional ten meters to land near a Federation Marine who had just returned from a shift of the unfortunate duty of scrubbing Zoomer guts from the base generators' pistons—why _did_ those stupid things keep crawling in there to a painful and messy death?—and was not in a good mood. He jumped, understandably, as the polymer shell crashed down at his feet, and immediately he whirled to glare up at the roof in search of one of his Marine buddies, who he was sure had just lobbed the unlikely missile at him. But his search proved futile, and he returned his attention to the helmet itself. From a single glance it looked like standard-issue gear that might have been worn by unarmored personnel such as technicians aboard any GF vessel, albeit in a decidedly non-standard-issue color, but looking closer the Marine noticed some odd features. The visor was the wrong shape; far too angular, and it looked like its release worked differently than the helmets he was used to seeing. As for the large '07', well...

He might have thought that perhaps one of the base researchers, frustrated from the usual woes of base researchers (such as terrible coffee and a lack of ridiculous government grants), had gone berserk and thrown a prototype off the roof or out the window, but he wasn't anywhere near the research sector, and besides, the helmet looked a little too battle-damaged to be brand-new. And so the Marine, blissfully unaware of the conflicts that arise when an unnecessary alternate universe is introduced after the fact, brought the helmet to an officer, who sent it to the science department with a note attached that consisted of two jagged question marks, and the head researcher, who identified what seemed to be Galactic Federation serial numbers on the helm but could not match them to anything anywhere, ordered it to be sent to an even bigger Federation base on some other planet. One scheduling error later, the helmet was in a crate, sandwiched between two large drills, on its way to a mining expedition on the world of Tallon IV.

When the crew discovered the helmet, they left it sitting in the ship to take back with them when they left, but it seemed destiny had other plans. During the miners' lunch break—_who are they kidding? they set their own schedules; it's lunch break 98% of the time_—a Space Pirate raiding party, having apparently not gotten the memo that the Space Pirates had been destroyed and all raiding parties were therefore defunct, proceeded to raid the mining site with great gusto. This raid was largely unsuccessful, partly because the Pirates were of the sort that had likely caused notices like "Metroid are not pets. Do not use Metroids for target practice" to be posted around their former outpost on Tallon IV, and partly because there wasn't anything of value to steal. They did succeed in making off with the ship, however (the mining crew had enough alcohol on site to facilitate 'let's shoot those damned annoying bats all over the place; goddamn the bastards' games until a rescue party arrived), with the helmet still inside. They piloted the craft to Zebes, with much arguing over the correct route along the way; expecting as they arrived to find a headquarters that had probably, hell, even _tripled_ in size since they had last seen it, they were instead met with the charred ruins of what, if you kind of squinted, could vaguely be made out to have once been a fortress. Needless to say, the Pirates' frustrations were not expressed constructively.

Somewhere in between Pirate 1 performing a spectacular flying kick on Pirate 4 and Pirate 6 attempting to bite off Pirate 8's foot—or maybe it was between Pirate 3 insulting Pirate 2's mother and Pirate 4 performing a spectacular flying kick on Pirate 1—the helmet was knocked from the ship and rolled into a nearby crevasse. It fell deep into the heart of planet Zebes, ricocheting off a rock wall here and there, and ultimately landed in a charming lava pool (_wait—the armor can withstand lava? ohmygod ohmygod _KG lived!) and floating along in a lava tributary for a while. When the lava stream sharply morphed into a lava-fall, the headwear may have at last reached its final resting place at the rocky bottom of a dormant volcano shaft had its path not been intercepted by a another object which, at first glance, appeared to be a croissant with eyes.

The Ripper, deciding it didn't mind the presence of its new passenger—you know, as much as a Ripper ever _decided_ anything—continued on its way, floating in an ostensibly infinite straight line. And so the helmet was carried atop the creature's carapace out of fiery Norfair and through the swamps of Maridia, among the stalagmites of Crateria and past the decrepit Chozo Ruins, over the acid pools of Brinstar and finally to the stronghold doors of Tourian. Here at last the Ripper changed direction, heading exactly the way it had come (this particular croissant, having had the good fortune not to cross paths with any emotionally unstable somersaulting bounty hunters, had in fact been traveling that same path since not long after the very formation of Zebes), but the helmet tumbled from its back as it reversed its course. There it lay in a silence that was almost contemplative (okay, not really) for some time until, again against all odds, it was stumbled upon, this time by a Galactic Federation exploration team poking around for...well, anything. Technology, plant or animal specimens, Pirate records. Maybe some really cool rocks. This team had recently been exploring SR388, but after their guide had appeared to be eaten alive by giant flying globs of yellow jam (they didn't stick around to see how that turned out), they had decided to go explore a less dangerous planet. And—jackpot? They'd heard from the base on Norion about some strange helmet turning up out of nowhere, apparently manufactured by the GF but a complete mystery in all other regards, and here was _another one!_ In the ruins of the Space Pirate headquarters, no less! Being completely out of the loop (though not quite comparable to the Space Pirate raiding party), the team decided to return to the BSL space station, out of which they had been operating, and deliver the helmet to the scientists there, to see what they could get out of it—after all, they could stand to take a break from messing around with those monkey- and ostrich-things. And that is what they did.

In fact, that was the _last_ thing they did. Moments after stepping from their ship into the BSL docking bay, they were eaten alive by giant flying blobs of yellow, blue, green, and red jam (or is that jelly?). The helmet was automatically unloaded from their cargo hold and bundled off to the _random-objects-that-we'll-get-around-to-someday_ holding area, joining among other things a giant green scaly arm with two pointy claws at one end, a journal marked _Y. S._ which appeared to have been written in crayon, and a data disk which bore the label "Metroid Dread." It wasn't long, however, before a stray X Parasite blorped its way through the wall and approached the jumble of miscellaneous things. The creature lingered momentarily on the green arm but ultimately moved past it and to the helmet, and then it blorped its way inside. A minute later, it blorped its way out and gradually morphed (with gratuitous blorping) and shifted and changed until it was an exact replica of the headgear. Immediately, in swooped a mechanical arm that latched onto the mimicked helmet and whisked it back into the cargo bay; the logic being that, especially since it was in the _things-we-don't-get-paid-preposterous-amounts-of-money-to-look-at_ bin, a duplicate item was not really needed. It was at this moment that a very ugly and very angry Omega Metroid, recently free from the confines of a giant, foreshadowing plot-egg, stomped its way into the docking area, fixin' for a fight. Finding none, the beast threw something of a tantrum and began disemboweling the uglier of the two ships present (not that the purple one was much of a looker), utterly decimating the vessel until nothing remained but a twisted heap of burning metal, and then eating that heap until nothing remained whatsoever. Upon entering the bay, the robot arm decided to deposit the not-helmet in the one ship available—the violet-hued one which, despite having been thrown together by unqualified Federation temps, _still_ resembled the helmet of Samus Aran.

Said Samus Aran herself entered the docking bay at this point, and, following her ignominious defeat by a single swipe of the Omega Metroid's claws, a veritable drama of glowing blob-turned-bounty hunter impersonator vs. cute green jellyfish-turned-_this thing has way too many suckers_ began to play out. When the metaphorical dust settled, all parties involved were surprised to learn that the BSL station was on a collision course with the planet it had until recently been orbiting, SR388, in some misguided attempt to destroy both station and planet, or something. Samus hopped aboard her ship and sped away, leaving the real helmet sitting forlornly among the discarded, unwanted leftovers of the universe. And when BSL struck the surface of SR388 and its nuclear core exploded, the helmet was crushed, flattened, scorched, melted, vaporized, and erased entirely from existence.

And it didn't matter, because it was just a stupid helmet, and it was not worth anything.

However, Samus, easily the only person who _did_ think it was worth something, was content. As far as she knew, the helmet was safe and sound by her bedside table, and as welcoming as ever of her gut-spilling monologues in its general direction. She never noticed how it would occasionally flex slightly of its own accord, as if in annoyance, or even turn up _not quite_ exactly where she left it. The helmet, as far as she knew, was doing nothing out of the ordinary (that is, doing anything at all).

When it reality it was watching.

Biding its time.

Waiting.

Waiting…

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A/N: The end doesn't actually require any suspension of disbelief, because in Other M canon Samus is a moron. The moral of the story is, being overly sentimental and doing things like going and getting a mass-produced and generic helmet from a space station that's scheduled for destruction will get you **eaten by X Parasites. ** This moral is of course completely inapplicable to everyday life, but hey, it needed saying somewhere.

Hope you liked it!


	2. Bonus: Powerup Origins

This is a short little story I wrote as an "explanation" of all the random powerups scattered around the various planets in Metroid games. I have to say, I wouldn't discount it entirely as the real reason those pickups are where they are...

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The story begins many years ago, when the Chozo were just little chicklets in the nests of giant prehistoric birds...

Let me set the scene: hot iron pours down into sizzling smelting pits. Steam rises from an endless, spiderwebbing network of conveyer belts and lifts that churn and clank and turn endlessly. This is the Galactic Weapons Manufacturing main plant, where armaments of all kinds are created and then packaged-with lots of bubble wrap-for shipping across the star systems. Enter one plant manager, Mr. K.G. Igarashi.

_Igarashi, to a worker: What is this? What is this? We're two days behind schedule on the order for the Federation systems!_

__

Worker: We're working as fast as we can! But the creature—

_Igarashi, throwing up his palms: Don't! Don't breathe another word! I don't want you bringing that misfortune on us!_

Igarashi stalks away to get on another worker's case, and the man shakes his head, wondering how talking about the monster could somehow cause it to appear. _That's ridiculous,_ he thought to himself as he returned to his task. _There's no way that could happen._

Yet, against all odds, it happened.

They'd heard it before; knew it all too well. That low moan, swelling from the distance as if descending from the brilliant moon visible past the factory's open top. The workers stiffened, looking skyward in terror. Igarashi stopped in the act of dramatically drawing his hand across his neck in a _ghhhck_ sort of motion indicating what would happen should they be any later on the Federation contract, and swallowed nervously.

_Igarashi, sweating; his voice almost breaking: Why have you all stopped! Get back to work!_

A roar now; unmistakable, pronounced. A ghastly sound, like lost souls calling back from the grave, groaning to the living for reasons unknown and terrifying. It was inevitable that panic would break out; it always did, despite Igarashi's protests-they all knew what was coming. Men began to edge from their stations.

_Igarashi: No, no, no! It is nothing! The wind! Stay where you are! Get back to w—_

The wall immediately behind Igarashi was decimated as something large imposed its presence on the factory with great force, and the manager was lost in a flare of rubble. Moments before a heavy block of debris landed on him, unbeknownst to anyone—they were all fleeing—the man thought crossly to himself, _There goes the Federation contract_.

One of the workers screamed over the cacophony of wailing alarms as he ran. "_Crocomire!_"

The great red beast howled as it slouched through the giant hole it had punched in the thick stone wall and toward the pools of molten metal that bubbled and hissed as if leery themselves of his approach. The workers shoved and trampled each other in their wild hurry to escape the monster that had began tormenting their refinery for years—never before had it entered the building itself—and more than one unfortunate man was fed to the smelting containers. Only one of them had the wits to hit the large red button labeled (of course) DO NOT PRESS and activate the emergency materials ejection. The factory combined the intense heat of molten metal work with actual caches of the very, very explosive weapons it manufactured from that metal; were a fire—or even a significant amount of heat—to spread to the wrong area, a miles-wide area would become a large charred circle of ruins. This, while it certainly would have rid them of Crocomire, would also ensure they were all burned, liquefied, and dried to dust by the enormous and possibly partially nuclear and/or plasma-based blast. Then the lawsuits would begin.

The emergency protocol consisted of loading every last gun, bomb, missile, and bullet into a giant unmanned freighter which would ship off into space to a predetermined company location. Everything was going great until Crocomire decided to grab hold of one of the craft's wings in a passing fancy. Moments later, the monster found himself exiting the atmosphere, dangling from the ship as it rocketed away from the factory and the workers, many of whom would require long-term therapy to regain full control of their trembling limbs.

_Blurgh?_ he queried, reasonably, as a light tickling of roaring flames spilled out around him.

Minutes into hyperspace, the wing tore off completely; with a somewhat exasperated _Bluuuuuurrrrrrgh,_ Crocomire disappeared into the reaches of space, drifting, perhaps towards a certain planet where a few birds had just learned to stand on two legs...

The shuttle faired much worse. With one wing gone and nothing to seal the gap where it had been attached, hundreds upon hundreds of armaments spilled out of the freighter and into the vacuum—Missile Tanks, Bomb Containers, Beams, Suits… Igarashi might have sobbed.

_Years later, Samus Aran first found a Long Beam upgrade held__—__against all odds__—__in the hands of a Chozo statue._

_

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_A/N: A high-five to anyone who gets the pun/reference in the plant manager's name. I'll be updating this fic whenever I write another story that fits in it, which, given my general reluctance to focus for an extended period of time on my more-major wiritng projects, probably won't be long.

Before that, though, feel free to drop off your review...


	3. Croc Noir, Part 1

This is a little bit of a preview at the next installment in the _Other Stories_ portion of this fic. Enjoy some good old fashioned _noir!_

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The light from the window falls in bands over my desk like the bars of the cage they'd be slamming on Andre Gone right about now. Another case closed, another perp in the clink. I suck the smoke from my cigarette, feeling the burn as another bit of my lifespan down the drain. These days those are my two biggest enemies, booze and the smokes. But I don't worry too much. I'm not a lifestyle coach. I'm a private eye.

The name's O'Mire, Daniel O'Mire. You can call me Croc. Everyone does, even the dames.

I tilt the barrel of my .45 toward the door as someone walks through it without knocking. Speak of the devil, there's a dame coming in right there, trouble in a big shiny metal suit. Any second the smoke from my cig could be mixing the smoke from my gun, and I want the dame to know that. I hear a lot, and nothing I hear about this dame is good.

She says she had a job for me. I say, hey, I'm all ears, and so is my .45. I pull the hammer, and the gun clicks like my spine in the morning. She spins me a yarn; says, you know Andre, Andre Gone, yeah, well, he was only the tip of the iceberg. And if the dame is telling the truth, this is the kind of iceberg that sunk the _Titanic_. She tells me all about this operation going on. A local gang, the Pirates, comes up more than once. Now, in this town you don't drop the butt of your smoke of the sidewalk without a cop waist the size of a tire blaming it on the Pirates, but what this dame's saying is fitting with a lot of what I've been hearing. A big toothy-smuggling deal, illegal critters from Tetra and back passing through Maridia Port. I've been to those docks, and I can tell you, the whole setup stinks like the leftover pieces of that Zoomer you found in your vent.

Still, I'm a private eye, not your vigilante justice boy in a cape, so I wasn't much entertaining the dame's proposal. But she got awful persuasive, and with the barrel of that big gun pointed in my direction I found her arguments very convincing. Half an hour later and I'm on the streets, and the rain is coming down hard. I'm not what you'd call a social climber, so I don't have a whole lot of friends, but I've got people who'll talk to me about anything given a particular set of green circumstances.

Today's flavor is an old mafioso by the name of Slade. He's the son of the biggest crime boss this city ever saw, K. Rayd, who met his iron slug thirty years back rather than pay a bar tab. By his word, Junior's been as clean as anyone in this town, and by anyone's he's at least cleaner than me, but if I can supply non-taxable income he's suddenly the most experienced crook on the block. We have our differences now and then, but we settle with fists, not bullets.

Today, though, Slade's on edge. I'm picking up on something fishy in the air today, and it's not just rainwater from the docks. He'll barely talk to me, and the usual greenbacks hardly get a peep out of him. I'm wondering whether to bluff about some dirt I have on him or to introduce him to the friend I hold closest to my heart—a little down and to the left, to be exact—when he looks around, shifty like a stool pigeon in the lunch line, then leans in close and tells me how, in his honest opinion, I should drop it. If not, he remarks with typical sincerity, I might find a lead at Club Crateria. Bryn Star, I should ask for Bryn Star.

What gets Slade spooked gets me spooked, but I get the feeling that blonde dame could make life a lot more difficult for me than it already is for me, and believe me, I don't more complications on top of the ones my heart's already got. So I head to the club, a classy joint that looks like it was built out of the parts of a couple stripped cars. I tell the bartender I'm looking for Bryn, and he laughs in my face like I'm Fat Man's Weekly Humor Column and tells me me and everyone else. I take this to mean one of two things. One, Bryn's a very popular girl and probably a dancer, or two, someone was here before me asking the same thing very recently. Or, both. I ask the walking eggcup about it, and, as it turns out, it's both.

Now I'm in a hurry, out again in the rain, because if the kind of people I'm thinking of are looking for this girl, then pretty soon there won't be much of her left for me to find. The bartender was short on dough—plenty around his midsection—and in relieving that issue I learned where Bryn lived, and luckily it wasn't far. Running in the rain with tarred lungs and a bad heart, though, anything can feel far.

My .45 is out of my coat and in my hand before I step through the busted door and into the living room. Someone beat me there, and they made one hell of a mess before leaving in quite a hurry. Looking at the scene I think either that, or Bryn owns a big dog with anger issues.

In the other rooms, all of them trashed, I find little in the way of clues, but it doesn't look like Bryn Star had been dragged out, either. I'm on my way to the bedroom, maybe to figure out where she went or at least if she'd skipped town, and I let my guard down long enough for a heavy lamp to sneak up behind me and crack me but good in the back of the skull, and all I get to think before I hit the ground and the breaker in my head is thrown is, _I got my lights knocked out by a lamp._

o – o – o

I push my way through the molasses clogging my brain and work on focusing my eyes. My head aches like it's split neck to eyebrows, and for not the first time I wonder how long I've really got until my old body figures it's had enough and gives out for good. I make the effort to get my eyes moving, but I already know I'm not at the docks thanks to the lack of smell. That's good. It means the chances of waking up to a bullet in the brain are a little lower.

I try to move the rest of me and that's when I realize I'm trussed up tighter than your Thanksgiving's turkey, tied in fact to chair. Whoever did it's not that great at knots, but it looks like the old quantity over quality approach did the trick here. I'm less free than I was when that dame walked in with her proposition. Seems I've got time to think, so I think about the dame. What's her angle? Is she working for some old enemy of mine, wants to see me squirm? I think it's either that or she's a stoolie; wants out of the Pirates with no risk I'll clue them in—thanks to that barrel she was toting, she knows I'll end up with a side of butter even before they find her. Mutually assured destruction, they call it.

My thinking is interrupted like your regularly scheduled programming as in walks five foot seven of pale blue eyes, pale blonde hair, and pale white skin, and right away I see why Bryn is such a popular girl—one of two kinds of reasons, anyway. She's a little smaller than the sort I was on the lookout for—usually big, burly henchmen who look like a nature channel special on bears, with guns—so that explains how she got the drop on me. Question is, why? And depending on the answer to that, why hasn't she killed me?

We get acquainted. First there's a lot of talk of who I am, which I'm not too keen on answering, but pretty soon we work out that I'm not with the guys who trashed her place—mostly after I tell her how if I was, my partners would have still been around to other her m after she tried splitting my skull (take that how you will). So I get to asking her about her, and she isn't filling me in on what I really want to know. Dancer at Club Crateria, yeah, I got that.

Who are you, Bryn, really?

She unties me and my hand heads for my tender cranium reflexively. She isn't apologetic. Dames are like that. I'm wondering how I can get her to trust me enough to fill me in on just what the Pirates are up to when the most unlikely bunch provides the perfect solution: a hit squad. My friend makes an increasingly not-so-rare appearance and introduces himself to the goons while Bryn and I move away from the windows like it's a grade school tornado drill. I'm thinking it's unusually smart of the goons to come looking here a second time so soon, and then I remember the lard-soaked bartender's sweaty palms grabbing at my money. Is everyone in this town crooked? Zebes used to have some honest types…

The rebuttals to my friend's high-caliber arguments remind me to get moving, and quick. I take Bryn out the back door and up the fire escape—up is the last place they'll expect, and I know a shortcut of sorts. Bryn yells that there's no other way off the roof, but I know different. She actually makes the jump surprisingly well, and we're on the next roof, then down, and then we're gone before the goons have even stopped shooting up Bryn's empty apartment.

Bryn's decided it's in her best interest to stick with me, and she tells me we should head down to the Norfair district. Norfair's hardcore downtown, the lowest you can get in this already low-down town, and I recommend we move in a less rock-bottom direction, but Bryn is not open to my suggestion. I figure she's got a reason, and down's where we head. The roads we take on our way there are like recently vacated warzones, and my heart's doing the uneven bars at every shadow I see. Normally I wouldn't be this nervous, but I don't like the way this night feels, and besides, I don't want anything to happen to Bryn.

As we go, the red glow coming from Norfair gets stronger—everything is lit blood red in Norfair. The more I think about what Slade told me, or rather what he didn't tell me, the more convinced I get that what's going down is something that could blow the whole town to hell if it goes south, The Pirates are bad, sure, but their leadership's never had enough spark in the brain to run your grandma's pacemaker. Head honcho's a guy by the name of Scott, street name R, years ago a lackey of K. Rayd's. A real piece of work; nasty in a fight and cruel, period, but easily defeated by a first-grade math problem. Point is, someone must be organizing them. I keep my thoughts to myself, something we private eyes are inclined to do until we've got some evidence behind our hunches, and I figure I'll just wait and see where Bryn takes me.

That red-hot glow gets brighter and brighter, and I get the feeling we're getting closer and closer to something real bad.

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A/N: So, intrigued yet? This will be continued shortly!

...I admit, this is nothing more than a combination of knowledge of noir style obtained from _Sin City_ and _Calvin and Hobbes_'s Tracer Bullet stories.


End file.
